Could our universe be a quark in a bigger universe ?

It is impossible to ever know what the universe is like at scale larger than the current horizon to the universe some 10 to 15 billion light years distant. The universe we see certainly doesn't behave like a quark or any sub-atomic particle because the motions of the galaxies and stars we see are not dictated by the laws of quantum mechanics. However, there was one time when this was true. Soon after the Big Bang, all of the matter we see out to the farthest galaxies was crunched into a volume of space smaller than an atom. At that time, there were only the laws of quantum mechanics to determine the detailed properties of matter in the universe. Earlier still, the universe may have been smaller than a proton, and even a quark. That doesn't mean the universe was a proton or a quark, only that its size was comparable to how big these things are today. Some cosmologists believe that our universe is a part of an unimaginably vaster 'thing' and that what we now see around us may be just a small point in a vast tapestry of structure extending to infinity. We will never know, because these issues are beyond scientific analysis and observation.

Copyright 1997 Dr. Sten Odenwald